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Research on the significance of prehistoric clay figures of human beings (the first self-conscious expressions of human identity) was presented to the public, through two major exhibitions with associated programming attracting over 200,000 visitors, generating an estimated £5 million of economic activity. The Power of Dogu (British Museum, 10.09.09 - 22.11.09: over 78,000 visitors; Tokyo National Museum, 15.2.09 - 21.02.10: around 120,000 visitors) was followed by Unearthed (UEA, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, 22.06.10 - 29.08.10). The project attracted funding from AHRC (£282,000) the Mitsubishi Corporation (£100,000), Japan Foundation (£15,000); Hitachi funded a new online resource in English about Japanese archaeology (£120,000).
Professor Timon Screech's scholarship on under-researched areas of Japanese art, history and culture has reached a range of audiences outside of academia. Notably, it has produced a significant impact on cultural life, demonstrated most clearly by its influence on the renowned author David Mitchell in the writing of his best-selling historical novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, set in Japan in the late 1700s (2010). Mitchell drew extensively upon several of Screech's publications to inform and, ultimately, enrich his work of fiction, furnishing it with historical contextual detail unavailable in any other scholarly source.
This case study demonstrates how through the innovative use of photography and the creation of a multi-sensory, spatial context within the museum, distinctive opportunities are produced for re- evaluating deep-rooted cultural stereotypes and disseminating complex knowledge to the general public. The exhibition `At Home in Japan' focused on everyday domestic life to question popular stereotypes that depict Japan as the quintessential, exotic other. The exhibition had an impact on multiple audiences as substantiated by the large visitor numbers, the success of the schools' programme, community outreach workshops, curatorial tours and study days, the subsequent interest in the use of these experimental techniques by museum/academic institutions overseas, and extensive coverage internationally in the traditional media and on the internet.
Since 1993, the Visual Culture Research Centre has established an international reputation for interdisciplinary research. Historical, theoretical and practice-based research is applied in collaborations and partnerships with outside public-facing organisations, events, markets and professionals in the creative arts. This case study articulates significant social and cultural impacts epitomised by the exhibitions Weapons of Mass Communication 2007-8 and Archiving Place and Time 2009-10 and accompanying publications. The case study demonstrates how the researchers from within the unit have effectively engaged with the public, participants, practitioners, interpreters, writers, and critics to promote understanding of how images of conflict work: that they are neither natural nor real, but sites of contestation.
The multi-sensory, immersive exhibition `At Home in Japan', held at the Geffrye Museum in London in 2011, enabled Western audiences (including the public and school groups) to gain a better understanding of everyday life inside contemporary urban Japanese homes, overturning deep- rooted cultural stereotypes that continue to depict Japan as the quintessential, exotic Other. Through this exhibition, Daniels' ethnographic research has had a wide cultural and educational impact on multiple audiences, enhancing their understanding and appreciation of Japanese culture, and demonstrating the fallacy of the traditional minimalist stereotype with which it is commonly associated. The reach and significance of this impact is substantiated by the large numbers of visitors to the exhibition, the majority of whom responded extremely positively to the experience; the success of the schools' programme, community outreach workshops, curatorial tours, and study days; and the extensive enthusiastic coverage in traditional media and on the internet. Moreover, through its innovative uses of photographs and objects, the exhibition has been able to take museum practice in a new direction, encouraging in other museums similar approaches to enriching visitor experiences.
The first major international touring exhibition on the region, Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, attracted up to a third of a million visitors between opening at UCLA's Fowler Museum in February 2011 and closing at the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, in January 2013, with intervening shows at Stanford University's Cantor Center and the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. The exhibition, its 600-page catalogue, and extensive education and outreach programmes, substantially based on Professor Richard Fardon's research insights, were widely reviewed as a revelatory experience providing the public with a first comprehensive overview of the hitherto poorly understood arts of central Nigeria.
Ysanne Holt was Academic Advisor and Commissioning Editor for Tate's Camden Town Group in Context project, funded through the Getty Foundation's Online Scholarly Catalogue Initiative which aims to transform how museums disseminate information about their collections. Holt undertook and commissioned new research into the Group's artworks and their broader contexts. Impacts derived from the project's online catalogue include increased awareness for national and international public and specialists; and improved access to the art and its contexts via a multi-platform open access facility. In addition, the project has influenced the Tate's Digital Strategy and led to the creation of the new post of Digital Editor within Tate's Research Department.
The three key areas of impact are:
Impact 1 is significant because it has directly and demonstrably affected the ways that two groups of museum professionals deal with their interface with the public. Impact 2 is significant because icons are perhaps the most important - and certainly the best known to a broad public — manifestation of Byzantine culture; changes in the way that they are presented to museum audiences and other readers of museum pamphlets have a direct impact on public understanding of Byzantine art and culture. Impact 3 is significant because it affects how Byzantine history and art history will be understood and taught to the next generation of Italian university students (Italy has the highest proportion of students at secondary school and university level taking modules in Byzantine studies of any country in Europe).
From 2004 to the present, Gemma Blackshaw (Reader in Art History at Plymouth, 2002-present) has worked on the relationship between mental illness, psychiatry, and the visual arts in Vienna 1900. Through exhibition, a non-specialist book, film, and associated social media platforms, this work has reached and responded to audiences outside academia, including mental health communities. It has generated new knowledge, interpretations and approaches to the history and study of mental illness. It has encouraged international public discourse on how society used to engage with the mentally ill, and how we continue to engage with this community 100 years on.
A popular, influential and highly acclaimed public exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London, and Wien Museum, `Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900' (2009), demonstrates the impacts of an interdisciplinary research cluster within Birkbeck's History of Art Department. Working with a number of academic and non-academic partners in Plymouth, London and Vienna, the AHRC-funded project contributed a new understanding of the development and role of the arts in turn-of-the-century Vienna. By engaging participants in new experiences and knowledge, it generated considerable media interest and public discourse that particularly benefited the non-academic partners.